The Dream Master (11 page)

They stayed longer, laughed less.

They were the part of the flow which formed pools, sparkled…

“Interested in heading out some day?”

The boy turned his head, shifted on his crutches.

He regarded the lieutenant colonel who had addressed him. The officer was tall. Tanned hands and face, dark eyes, a small moustache and a narrow, brown pipe, smoldering, were his most prominent features, beyond his crisp and tailored uniform.

“Why?” asked the boy.

“You’re about the right age to be planning your future. Careers have to be mapped out pretty far in advance. A man can be a failure at thirteen if he doesn’t think ahead.”

“I’ve read the literature…”

“Doubtless. Everyone your age has. But now you’re seeing samples—and mind you, they’re
only
samples—of the actuality. That’s the big, new frontier out there—the great frontier. You can’t know the feeling just from reading the booklets.”

Overhead, the monorail-car rustled on its way across the Hall. The officer indicated it with his pipe.

“Even
that
isn’t the same as riding the thing over a Grand Canyon of ice,” he noted.

“Then it is a deficiency on the part of the people who write the booklets,” said the boy. “Any human experience should be describable and interpretable—by a good enough writer.”

The officer squinted at him.

“Say that again, sonny.”

“I said that if your booklets don’t say what you want them to say, it’s not the fault of the material.”

“How old are you?”

“Ten.”

“You seem pretty sharp for your age.”

The boy shrugged, lifted one crutch and pointed it in the direction of the Gallery.

“A good painter could do you fifty times the job that those big, glossy photos do.”

“They are very good photos.”

“Of course, they’re perfect. Expensive too, probably. But any of those scenes by a real artist could be priceless.”

“No room out there for artists yet. Ground-breakers go first, culture follows after.”

“Then why don’t you change things and recruit a few artists? They might be able to help you find a lot more ground-breakers.”

“Hm,” said the officer, “that’s an angle. Want to walk around with me some? See more of the sights?”

“Sure,” said the boy. “Why not? ‘Walk’ isn’t quite the proper verb, though…”

He swung into step beside the officer and they moved about the exhibits.

The scaleboats did a wall crawl to their left, and the claw-cans snapped.

“Is the design of those things really based on the structure of a scorpion’s pincers?”

“Yes,” said the officer. “Some bright engineer stole a trick from Nature.
That is
the kind of mind we’re interested in recruiting.”

The boy nodded.

“I’ve lived in Cleveland. Down on the Cuyahoga River they use a thing called a Hulan Conveyor to unload the ore-boats. It is based on the principle of the grasshopper’s leg. Some bright young man with the sort of mind you’re interested in recruiting was lying in his back yard one day, pulling the legs off grasshoppers, and it hit him: ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘there might be some use to all this action.’ He took apart some more grasshoppers and the Hulan Conveyer was born. Like you say, he stole a trick that Nature was wasting on things that just hop around in the fields, chewing tobacco and being pesty. My father once took me on a boat trip up the river and I saw the things in operation. They’re great metal legs with claws at the end, and they make the most godawful unearthly noise I ever heard—like the ghosts of all the tortured grasshoppers. I’m afraid I don’t have the kind of mind you’re interested in recruiting.”

“Well,” said the officer, “it seems that you might have the other kind.”

“What other kind?”

“The kind you were talking about: The kind that will see and interpret, the kind that will tell the people back home what it’s really like out there.”

“You’d take me on as a chronicler?”

No, we’d have to take you on as something else. But that shouldn’t stop you. How many people were drafted for the World Wars for the purpose of writing war novels? How many war novels were written? How many good ones? There
were
quite a few, you know. You could plan your background to that end.”

“Maybe,” said the boy.

They walked on.

“Come this way?” asked the officer.

The boy nodded and followed him out into a corridor and then into an elevator. It closed its door and asked them where they wished to be conveyed.

“Sub-balc,” said the lieutenant colonel.

There was scarcely a sensation of movement, then the doors opened again. They stepped out onto the narrow balcony which ran around the rim of the soup bowl. It was glassite-enclosed and dimly lit.

Below them lay the pens and a part of the field.

“There will be several vehicles lifting off shortly,” said the officer. “I want you to watch them, to see them go up on their wheels of fire and smoke.”

“‘Wheels of fire and smoke,’” said the boy, smiling. “I’ve seen that phrase in lots of your booklets. Real poetic, yes sir.”

The officer did not answer him. None of the towers of metal moved.

“These don’t really go out, you know,” he finally said. “They just convey materials and personnel to the stations in orbit. The real big ships never land.”

“Yes, I know. Did a guy really commit suicide on one of your exhibits this morning?”

“No,” said the officer, not looking at him, “it was an accident. He stepped into the Mars Grav-room before the platform was in place or the air cushion built up. Fell down the shaft.”

“Then why isn’t that exhibit closed?”

“Because all the safety devices are functioning properly. The warning light and the guard rail are both working all right.”

“Then why did you call it an accident?”

“Because he didn’t leave a note.—There! Watch now, that one is getting ready to lift!” He pointed with his pipe.

A blizzard of vapors built up around the base of one of the steel stalagmites. A light was born in its heart. Then the burning was beneath it, and waves of fumes splashed across the field, broke, rose high into the air.

But not quite so high as the ship.

… Because it was moving now.

Almost imperceptibly, it had lifted itself above the ground. Now, though, the movement could be noted.

Suddenly, with a great gushing of flame, it was high in the air, darting against the gray.

It was a bonfire in the sky, then a flare; then it was a star, rushing away from them.

“There is nothing quite like a rocket in flight,” said the officer.

“Yes,” said the boy. “You’re right.”

“Do you want to follow it?” said the man. “Do you want to follow that star?”

“Yes,” said the boy. “Someday I will.”

“My own training was pretty hard, and the requirements are even tougher these days.”

They watched two more ships lift off.

“When was the last time you were out, yourself?” asked the boy.

“It’s been awhile…” said the man.

“I’d better be going now. I’ve got a paper to write for school.”

“Let me give you some of our
new booklets first.”

“Thanks, I’ve got them all.”

“Okay, then… Good night, fella.”

“Good night. Thanks for the show.”

The boy moved back toward the elevator. The officer remained on the balcony, staring out, staring up, holding onto his pipe which had gone out.

The light, and twisted figures, struggling…

Then darkness.

“Oh, the steel! The pain as the blades enter! I am many mouths, all of them vomiting blood!”

Silence.

Then comes the applause.

“…
the plain, the direct, and the blunt. This is Winchester Cathedral,” said the guidebook. “With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces: the ceilings are flat; each bay, separated by those shafts, is itself a thing of certainty and stability. It seems, indeed, to reflect something of the spirit of William the Conqueror. Its disdain of mere elaboration and its passionate dedication to the love of another world would make it seem, too, an appropriate setting for some tale out of Mallory…”

“Observe the scalloped capitals,” said the guide. “In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif…”

“Faugh!” said Render—softly though, because he was in a group inside a church.

“Shh!” said Jill (Fotlock—that was her real last name) DeVille.

But Render was impressed as well as distressed.

Hating Jill’s hobby, though, had become so much of a reflex with him that he would sooner have taken his rest seated beneath an oriental device which dripped water on his head than to admit he occasionally enjoyed walking through the arcades and the galleries, the passages and the tunnels, and getting all out of breath climbing up the high twisty stairways of towers.

So he ran his eyes over everything, burnt everything down by shutting them, then built the place up again out of the still smoldering ashes of memory, all so that at a later date he would be able to repeat the performance, offering the vision to his one patient who could see only in this manner. This building he disliked less than most. Yes, he would take it back to her.

The camera in his mind photographing the surroundings, Render walked with the others, overcoat over his arm, his fingers anxious to reach after a cigarette. He kept busy ignoring his guide, realizing this to be the nadir of all forms of human protest. As he walked through Winchester he thought of his last two sessions with Eileen Shallot.

He wandered with her again.

Where the panther walks to and fro on the limb overhead…

They wandered.

Where the buck turns furiously at the hunter…

They had stopped when she held the backs of her hands’ to her temples, fingers spread wide, and looked sideways at him, her lips parted as if to ask a question.

“Antlers,” he had said.

She nodded, and the buck approached.

She felt its antlers, rubbed its nose, examined its hooves.

“Yes,” she’d said, and it had turned and walked away and the panther had leapt down upon its back and torn at its neck.

She watched as it bayonetted the cat twice, then died. The panther tore at its carcass and she looked away.

Where the rattlesnake suns his flabby length on a rock…

She watched it coil and strike, coil and strike, three times. Then she felt its rattles.

She turned back to Render.

“Why
these
things?”

“More than the idyllic must you know,” he had said, and he pointed.

…
Where the alligator in his tough pimples sleeps by the bayou.

She touched the plated hide. The beast yawned. She studied its teeth, the structure of its jaw.

Insects buzzed about her. A mosquito settled on her arm and began to sting her. She slapped at it and laughed.

“Do I pass?” she asked.

Render smiled, nodded.

“You hold up well.”

He clapped his hands, and the forest was gone, and the swamp was gone.

They stood barefoot on stirring sands, and the sun and its folding ghost came down to them from the surface of the water high above their heads. A school of bright fish swam between them, and the seaweed moved back and forth, polishing the currents that passed.

Their hair rose and moved about like the seaweed, and their clothing stirred. Whorled, convoluted and twisted, pink and blue and white and red and brown, trails of seashells lay before them, leading past walls of coral, heaps of seasmoothed stone, and the toothless, tongueless mouths of giant clams, opened.

They moved through the green.

She stooped and sought among the shells. When she stood again, she held a huge, eggshell-thin trumpet of pale blue, whorled at the one end into a concavity which might have been a giant’s thumbprint, and corkscrewing back to a hooked tail through labyrinths of spaghetti-fine pipette.

“That’s it,” she said. “The original shell of Daedalus.”

“Shell of Daedalus?”

“Know you not the story, m’lord, how the greatest of artificers, Daedalus, did go into hiding one time and was sought by King Minos?”

“I faintly recall…”

“Throughout the ancient world did he seek him, but to no avail. For Daedalus, with his arts, could near-duplicate the changes of Proteus. But finally one of the king’s advisers hit upon a plan to locate him.”

“What was that?”

“By means of this shell, this very shell which I hold before you now and present to you this day, my artificer.”

Render took her creation into his hands and studied it.

“He sent it about through the various cities of the Aegean,” she explained, “and offered a huge reward to the man who could pass through all its chambers and corridors a single strand of thread.”

“I seem to remember…”

“How it was done, or why? Minos knew that the only man who could find a way to do it would be the greatest of the artificers, and he also knew the pride of that Daedalus-knew that he would essay the impossible, to prove that he could do what other men could not.”

“Yes,” said Render, as he passed a strand of silk into the opening at its one end and watched it emerge from the other. “Yes, I remember. A tiny slip-knot, tightened about the middle of a crawling insect—an insect which he induced to enter at the one end, knowing that it was used to dark labyrinths, and that its strength far exceeded its size.”

“… And he strung the shell and collected his reward, and was captured by the king,”

“Let that be a lesson to all Shapers—Shape wisely, but not too well.”

She laughed.

“But of course he escaped later.”

“Of course.”

They mounted a stairway of coral.

Render drew the thread, placed the shell to his lips, and blew into it.

A single note sounded beneath the seas.

Where the otter is feeding on fish…

The lithe torpedo-shape swam by, invading a school of fish, gulping.

They watched it until it had finished and returned to the surface.

They continued to mount the spiny stairway.

Their heads rose above the water, their shoulders, their arms, their hips, until they stood, dry and warm, on the brief beach. They entered the wood that breasted it and walked beside the stream that flowed down to the sea.

Where the black bear is searching for roots and honey, where the beaver pats the mud—with his paddle-shaped tail..
.

“Words,” she said, touching her ear.

“Yes, but regard the beaver and the bear.”

She did so.

The bees hummed madly about the dark marauder, the mud splattered beneath the tail of the rodent.

“Beaver and bear,” she said. “Where are we going now?” as he walked forward again.

“
‘Over the growing sugar, over the yellow flower’d cotton plant, over the rice in its low moist field,’
” he replied, and strode ahead.

“What are you saying?”

“Look about you and see. Regard the plants, their forms and their colors.”

They walked on, walked by.

“
‘Over the western persimmon,’
” said Render, “
‘over the long-leav’d corn, over the delicate blue-flower flax.’
”

She knelt and studied, sniffed, touched, tasted.

They walked through the fields, and she felt the black earth beneath her toes.

“… Something I’m trying to remember,” she said.

“
‘Over the dusky green of the rye,’
” he said, “
‘as it ripples and shades in the breeze.’
”

“Wait a minute, Daedalus,” she told him. “It’s coming to me, slowly. You’re granting me a wish I’ve never wished aloud.”

“Come let us climb a mountain,” he suggested,
“holding on by low scragged limbs.”

They did so, leaving the land far beneath them.

“Rocks, and cold the wind. High, this place,” she said. “Where are we going?”

“To the top. To the very top.”

They climbed for a timeless instant and stood atop the mountain. Then it seemed that hours had passed in the climbing.

“Distance, perspective,” he said. “We have passed through all of that which you see beneath you. Look out across the plains and the forest to the sea.”

“We have climbed a fictional mountain,” she stated, “which I climbed once before, without seeing it.”

He nodded, and the ocean caught her attention again, beneath the other-blue sky.

After a time, she turned away, and they started down the opposite side of the mountain. Again, Time twisted and shaped itself about them, and they stood at the foot of the mountain and moved forward.

“‘…
Walking the worn path in the grass and beat through the leaves of the brush.
’”

“Now I know!” she said, clapping her hands. “Now I know!”

“Then where are we?” asked Render.

She plucked a single blade of grass, held it before him, then chewed it.

“Where?” she said. “Why,
“Where the quail is whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot,’
of course.”

A quail whistled then and crossed their path, the line of its young following as though pulled along on a string.

“Always,” she said, “have I wondered what it was all about.”

The passed along the darkening path, betwixt the woods and the wheat-lot.

“… So many things,” she said, “like a Sears and Roebuck catalog of the senses. Feed me another line.”

“
‘Where the bat flies in the Seventh-month eve,’
” said Render, raising his hand.

She ducked her head, before its swoop, and the dark form vanished within the wood.

“
‘Where the great gold-bug drops through the dark,’
” she replied.

… And it glittered like a 24-karat meteorite and fell to the path at his feet. It lay there for a moment like a sun-colored scarab, then crawled off through the grasses at the side of the trail.

“You remember now,” he said.

“I remember now,” she told him.

The Seventh-month eve was cool, and pale stars began in the heavens. He pointed out constellations as they walked. A half-moon tipped above the rim of the world, and another bat crossed it. An owl hooted in the distance. Cricket-talk emerged from the undergrowth. A persistent end-of-day glow still filled the world.

“We have come far,” she said.

“How far?” he asked.

“To
‘where the brook puts out of the roots of the old tree and flows to the meadow,’”
she stated.

“Aye,” he said, and he put forth his hand and leaned against the giant tree they had come upon. Rushing forth from among its roots was the spring which fed the stream they had followed earlier. It sounded, like a chain of small bells echoing off into the distance, as it sprang into the air and fell again upon itself and flowed away from them. It wound among the trees, digging into the ground, curling and cutting its way to the sea.

She waded out into the water. It arced over, it foamed about her. It rained down upon her and ran along her back and neck and breasts and arms and legs, returning.

“Come on in, the magic brook is fine,” she said.

But Render shook his head and waited.

She emerged, shook herself, was dry.

“Ice and rainbows,” she remarked.

“Yes,” said Render, “and I forget much of what comes next.”

“So do I, but I remember that a little later on
‘the mocking-bird sounds his delicious gurgles, cackles, screams, weeps.’
”

And Render winced as he listened to the mocking-bird.

“That was not my mocking-bird,” he stated.

She laughed.

“What difference? His turn was coming up soon, anyhow.”

He shook his head and turned away. She was back at his side again.

“I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful.”

“Very good.”

He walked on across the country.

“I forget the next part.”

“So do I.”

They left the stream far behind them.

They walked through the bending grass, across flat, borderless plains; and all but the peak of the sun’s crown vanished over the horizon.

Where sun-down shadows lengthen over the limitless and lonesome prairie…

“Did you say something?” she asked.

“No. But I remember again. This is the place
‘where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread of the square miles far and near.’”

A dark mass off to their left gradually took on a more distinct form, and as they watched they could make out the shapes of the great bison of the American plains. Apart from rodeos, cattle shows, and the backs of old nickels, the beasts stood now, individual and dark and smelling of the earth, slow, and huge, and hairy, all together they stood, horned heads lowered, great backs swaying, the sign of Taurus, the inexorable fecundity of spring, fading with the twilight into the passed and the
past—where the humming-bird shimmers
, perhaps.

They crossed the great plain, and the moon was now above them. They came at last to the opposite end of the land, where there were high lakes and another brook, ponds, and another sea. They passed emptied farms and gardens and made their way along the path of the waters.

“
‘Where the neck of the long-lived swan is curving and winding,’
”she said, seeing her first swan in the moonlight drift over the lake.

“
‘Where the laughing gull scoots by the shore,’
” he answered, “
‘where she laughs her near-human laugh.’
”

And across the night there was laughter, but it was like that of neither laughing-gull nor human, for Render had never heard a laughing gull. The chuckling sounds he had shaped from raw emotion chilled the evening around him.

He made the evening come warm again. He lightened the darkness, tinted it with silver. The laughter dwindled and died. A gull-shape departed in the direction of the ocean, dark and silver, dark and silver, turning.