Wine of the Dreamers

Six

Raul Kinson realized that eight years had proved Fedra correct. One never forgets those first few dreams, those first three dreams — one for each alien world de-marked on the dial at the head of the dream case.

Fedra had borne his child during that first year of the dreams. Sometimes he watched the children at their games, and wondered which one was his. He looked in vain for any sign of resemblance. He wondered at this curiosity, which the others did not seem to share.

Yes, the first dreams could never be forgotten. Even after eight years he remembered every moment of the second dream.

In his second dream he had a new certainty of contact, a new assurance born of the practice during the first dream. He was eager to see this second world. In his initial eagerness he had grasped the first contact mind, had thrust with all the power of intellect, motivated by strong curiosity.

And at once he had found himself in an alien body which writhed in bright hot light on a hard surface. He could not control the muscles or the senses of the captive body. Vision was broken fragments. Muscle spasms could not be controlled. He tried to withdraw pressure, but the host mind would not take over the body again. The brain he touched was shattered, irrational, sending messages of spasm to uncontrolled muscles. At first he thought he had inhabited a mind already broken, and then he began to guess that perhaps the full, uncontrolled thrust of his own mind had broken the host mind. He gave up all efforts at control and slid out of the host, impelling himself very gently toward the nearest contact.

He slid with restraint into this new mind, never taking over control, merely waiting and watching and listening at a sufficiently high level so that the language became clear. The new host was a brawny man in a blue uniform. He was saying, “Move back there! You! Give the guy air! Give him a chance, folks.”

A second man in uniform came over. “What you got, Al?”

“Fella with a fit or something. I sent in an ambulance call. You there, did I hear you say you’re a doctor? Take a look at him, will you?”

A man in gray bent over and wedged a pencil between the teeth of the man who writhed on the sidewalk. He looked up at the policeman. “Epileptic, I think. Better send for an ambulance.”

“Thanks, Doc. I already did.”

Raul looked curiously through the eyes of the man who called himself Al, who thought of himself as a policeman, as the metal machine on four wheels came down the street, making shrill screamings. It backed up over the curbing. Men in white examined the figure on the sidewalk, lifted him onto a stretcher and put him in the vehicle. It screamed into the distance.

Al took a small box from his jacket pocket, pressed a button and spoke with it close to his lips. He made a report and finally said, “I don’t feel so great. Like maybe a headache. If it gets worse I’m going to call in and ask off.”

He put the speaker back into his pocket. Raul looked out through Al’s eyes at a broad street full of hurrying people and strange objects on wheels guided by other people. The people were similar in form and coloring to the people of the first world. But their clothing was different. He searched through Al’s mind for words of identification and found that this city was called Syracuse, in a bigger area called New York State. The street was South Salina.

Raul also learned that Al’s feet hurt, that he was thirsty, and that his “wife” had gone to visit in some faraway place. He sensed that the “wife” was a mating partner, but it was unexpectedly more than that. It was a sharing of lives as well as a mating, and a living together in a specific non-community structure called a “home.” Soon he found a familiar relationship in another one of Al’s random thoughts. He thought of “money,” and Raul was able to identify it as the same kind of mysterious and apparently useless pieces of metal which had been pressed into his hand when he had been a water vendor on the first world. He learned that Al was given money in return for his services as a policeman, and the money went to provide food, clothing and the “home.” He inserted into Al’s mind the thought that no one would ever again give him any money and he was shocked by the strength of the wave of fear which followed the suggestion.

He looked through Al’s eyes into the store windows, trying to guess the possible uses for objects he had never seen in any of his years in the rooms of learning. When Al looked at something of his own accord, Raul could interpret the thoughts, identify the object and learn what it was used for. A thin stick with a metal spool at one end was used to trick a creature that lived under water and was called “bass.” When the hook was in the flesh of “bass,” it was reeled in and lifted into the boat and later eaten. When he saw the mental picture of a bass in Al’s mind, the thought of eating it made him feel queasy. When he forced Al to look at something, the man’s shock and fear at finding himself doing something without awareness or purpose was so great that his mind would freeze and Raul would learn nothing.

He spent ten hours in the city, learning to more skilfully detach himself from one host and move on to the next, learning the gradations of control, from a total takeover down to that point where he could rest in a corner of the host mind and be carried about, watching and listening and comprehending, with the host unaware of his presence. He drank beer, watched part of a motion picture, drove a car and a truck and a motorbike, watched television, typed letters, washed windows, broke into a locked car and stole a camera, tried on a wedding gown in a fitting room, drilled teeth, mated, swept a sidewalk, cooked meat, played a game with a ball. He learned that one must move into a child’s mind slowly and carefully, as into a small room full of fragilities, and once there one would find magical things, bright dreams and wishings. He learned that the minds of the very old ones are blurred and misted, with only the oldest memories still sharp and clear. He discovered the knack of so delicately insinuating a thought into the host mind that much could be learned from the response. Inside the mind it became a communication much like an odd conversation wherein the host mind thought it was talking to itself. Many of their thoughts were a little like dreams, in that they were yearnings and wishes and pictures of those satisfactions they wanted and did not have. Satisfactions of money and flesh and power. These were a frightened, insecure, discontented people, for the most part. They had all the violent impulses of the people in the first world, but in all their mechanized orderliness they had no way of releasing that violence. It shimmered in their minds and tore at them. They were not devoured by lions, but by their own buildings and machines. And they lived under a tyranny of “money” which seemed to Raul as cruel an oppression as that of Arrud the Elder, and as pointless.

The ten-hour dream ended, and he had tasted the minds of uncounted scores of hosts. He had awakened drained and wearied by the experience, he remembered. And he remembered also that as he had descended from the twentieth level he had passed Leesa, heading upward, and knew from her sly glance that she was on her way up to the rooms of learning. She was, at fourteen, taller than the others, ripening more quickly, but still dressed in the metallic sash of all the children of the Watchers.

Again, as after the first dream, he ate with a hunger that surprised him. Later he learned that the dreams always brought on this fierce need to fill the belly. As with the first dream, he tried to remember some of the alien words he had been able to speak while dreaming, but they were gone from his mind.

He finished and slid the eating tray back into the wall slot, hearing, as the orifice closed itself, the roaring of steam that would cleanse it for the next one to sit at that place. Two women and a man approached him as he stood up and asked him to come and sit with them in one of the talking places and tell them his dream. He went, but was so shy of his new knowledge, so obviously afraid his dream would sound both uninteresting and poorly told, that one of the women guessed the reason for his discomfort and told of her own dream first.

“I wanted to experience beauty and pain,” she said, “and I chose the first world, and searched for half the dreaming before I found her. She was locked in a room of stone, and she was very weak but very beautiful. She had very strong thoughts, full of pride and hate and passion. I could not understand what they wanted her to denounce. It was some belief that had no meaning to me. I learned there was very little time left to her, and I hoped I would not have to leave her before they ended her. The men who kept her locked there tried to break her. Always one watched while the others used her. Finally she was taken in her stained rags through narrow streets. They threw filth at her. She was tied to a post and they piled things around her and a man stood in front of her and spoke in a very loud voice recounting her crimes. Then something was thrown into the substance around her, and the pain came up around her body, crackling and spitting. It was the most terrible torment I have ever found on any world, the fullest and most delicious pain. Just before her mind went dark, it became all broken lights and images and things of no meaning. When it went dark I moved into one who stood so close the red pain warmed his face, and I looked at the black sagging thing still tied to the post, and it had once been beauty, but then you could not tell what it had been. Then the dream ended.”

In the silence Raul looked at the woman, Bara, saw her run the sharp pink tip of her tongue along her lips. Her eyes were shiny under the heavy lids. The glowing walls made highlights on her naked polished scalp.

One of the men smiled sadly and shook his head. “She always seeks pain and enjoys the enduring of it. Why should one want to feel what the dream creatures feel? I like best the second world. I move into the creatures and push their thoughts away. I do not want to gobble in their strange tongues. I like their darkness. I find a young strong male usually and make him crouch and wait and leap out at the weaker ones, breaking them with strong hands, running them down. The dream machines are clever. One could almost believe their screaming is real. Then they come to hunt the body I have taken. The game is to remain free until the dream ends. Sometimes there are too many of them with lights and weapons, and they break the body. Sometimes they catch it and hold it, and then I call them idiots in our own language, and they look sick with fear. These are exciting dreams.” He wore a secret smile and kneaded his fingers together and nodded and nodded.

“Did you have good dreams in the first two worlds? Did you dream well in the second world?” the other woman asked. They all stared at Raul expectantly.

He stood up. “I visited a great many in the second world. Some of them were... good to know, to be with in that way. And I wanted to help them and did not know how. I liked them... better than many I know here, among us.”

The three looked astonished and then began to laugh. It was a shrill and unfamiliar sound. There was little laughter among the Watchers. “Oh, oh, oh,” they cried in weakness, and the tears streamed. When at last the man could speak he stood also and rested his hand on Raul’s shoulder. “We should not laugh at you. It is all new to you. The dreams seem very real the first time. But you must understand, you dream the creatures. You and the machine create the creatures inside your sleeping mind. When you awaken they cease to exist. It is very plain that they cease to exist, because if they did exist, they would be here, would they not? This is the only place. All else is nothingness without end.”

Raul frowned at them. “There is one thing I do not know yet. Can one go back to the same world and find the same person again?”

“Yes. That is possible.”

“And has he... lived during the time you were not dreaming of him?”

“Lived?” the other woman said. “The question does not mean anything.”

“In one of my dreams can I ever dream of someone who has been in the dream of someone else?”

“It happens, but not often. It does not mean anything, Raul. It is only the cleverness of the machines turning fantastic and impossible things of the mind into three orderly worlds which seem to have chains of strange logic. But the proof is, of course, that life could not be sustained under those conditions. You will understand one day soon that it is all clever illusion, and it is there for you to enjoy now that you are no longer a child.”

Bara stood, with an echo of the laughter still purring in her throat. She plucked at a metal fold of Raul’s toga. Her lips were swollen and pulpy-looking, and her voice was soft-slurred. “Raul, this is the only world. This is the place where all things are right for us. Don’t let the machines delude you. Their magic is clever. Some of our people have gone mad through believing that the dream worlds are real. At last, when they begin to believe that this, the real world, is a dream, they have to be thrust out of this world. I have many reasons why I don’t want that to happen to you.” She tugged at his arm. “Come with me to one of the small game rooms and alone I will play for you some of the parts that I have known in dreams. You’ll find it interesting.”

He pulled away from her. He shouldered the man aside and walked away. At the twentieth level he looked down the row of cases. On the twentieth level the corridor walls and the floors were always dim. The brightest lights shone inside the cases themselves. Either way he looked, the cases stretched off, lining both sides of the corridor, diminishing into the distance.

He walked slowly between the cases. Many were empty. In many were dreamers. He saw Jord Orlan, hands crossed on his blue-white chest. Some were on their backs. Some curled. One woman dreamed with her arms clasped around her knees, her knees against her chest. He walked until at last he saw nothing but the empty cases, on either side of the corridor, mouth plates unused, cables coiled and waiting. The corridor turned sharply and he stared down another vista of the machines for dreaming. He walked slowly onward.

An inhabited case startled him. And then he saw that its occupant was long dead, cheeks and closed eyes shrunken into the skull, skin dark and withered. The lips were stretched back away from yellowed teeth and the teeth still loosely held the plate. One who died while dreaming, forgotten among the machines too far from the moving track to be used. When finally someone noticed that he was gone, it was probably believed that he had been properly inserted in the oval tube to speed down into the darkness.

Raul stood for a long time and looked into the case. He thought of telling Orlan, but that would entail explaining why he found it necessary to wander in unused places. This one had been dead a long time. Possibly he would never be found. He never would be inserted, head first, into the oval tube. Women were placed in the tube feet first. It was the Law.

Above his head was the soft sigh of one of the grilled apertures through which the warm air rushed. He turned and walked back to the broken track and went up in search of Leesa.

He found Leesa on a high level watching the screen where an ancient war was being fought. Sounds of battle roared from the speakers. He called to her and she turned off the machine, ran quickly to him, her eyes glowing.

She grasped his arm. “Tell me quickly! Tell me about the dreams.”

He sat down, scowled up at her eager face. “Somehow, I know they are all wrong. One day you will know it too. The dreams have more meaning than... what they say.”

“You are being absurd, Raul. They are only dreams. And it is our right to dream.”

“A child does not speak that way to a grown one. The dreams, I say, are reality. They are as real as this floor.” He stamped his bare foot.

She drew back a bit. “Don’t... say that, Raul. Don’t say it, even to me! They could put you out of the world. Through the door you told me about. And that would leave me alone here. There would be no other ugly one like me, with this hateful hair and these hideous heavy arms and legs.”

He smiled at her. “I won’t say it to anyone else. And you shall enjoy the dreams, Leesa. The women who look as you will look when you are grown are considered very beautiful.”

She stared at him. “Beautiful? Me? Raul, I am ugly like the women in these pictures I watch.”

“You will see. I promise.”

She sat on her heels beside his chair. She smiled up at him. “Come, now. Tell me. You promised you would. Tell me about the dreams.”

“On one condition.”

“You always make conditions,” she said, pouting.

“You must promise that you will help me search through all of these rooms, all of these thousands on thousands of spools. It may take us years. I do not know. But somewhere, Leesa, we shall find answers to all this. This place did not grow. It was built. What are the dreams? Why do we call ourselves the Watchers? It had to have a beginning. And somewhere, here, we will find the story of creation. Who made this world?”

“It has always been here.”

“Will you help me search?” She nodded. And as she kept her eyes on his face, her lips parted, he told her of the dreams of the first two worlds.

And on the following day, he told her of the third world, as soon as his dream had ended. He saw her directly after he had reported back to Jord Orlan and had been instructed in the single Law of those who dream. He was still shaken by the significance of Jord Orlan’s instruction.

She sat as before, staring up at him, rapt.

“The third world,” he said, “is entirely different. The first world is all blood and cruelty. The second world is a place of nervous fear and mechanisms and intricate social patterns based on an odd sort of fear. This third world... I am going to return there again. Many times. Their minds are full of power and subtlety. And I know that they know of us.”

“But that sounds silly, Raul! It’s only a dream. How can the creatures in a dream know of the dreamers? The other ones do not.”

“With the first mind I invaded, I was too cautious. There was a moment of resistance, then none. I went in confidently. While I was still moving softly, the mind thrust me away with such a surge of power I was forced to leave it. It took some time before I could find it again. This time I entered more firmly. The pressure was enormous. At last, when I took over sensory control, I saw that I was sitting in front of a small structure. The landscape was pleasant. Woods, trees, fields and flowers. There was no crudeness about the structure. The inner walls, which I could see, glowed the way these corridor walls glow. The machines in the house appeared to be automatic, much like the lower levels here. When I tried to sift the captive mind, to find out what sort of world this might be, I found nothingness. At first I thought the thing might be brainless, and then I remembered the astonishing power of the mind. I had full control of the body, but the mind itself seemed able to erect a barrier that shielded its thoughts. I looked in all directions and saw men and women, simply dressed, standing at a respectful distance and staring toward me. I stood up.

“My host let one thought seep into my mind. He told me to attempt no violence or those who watched would kill him immediately. The thoughts he transmitted to me came slowly and clearly and I had the impression he was speaking to an inferior, simplifying his thoughts for the sake of contacting a less acute mind. He told me it would be best to return to the place from whence I came. If I attempted to move to another mind, the new host would immediately be placed in the same position in which he found himself. I formed, with his lips, our word for ‘why.’ He said that they could read each other’s thoughts and found it relatively simple to sense an alien presence. I could detect grim humor. The others stood and watched and I began to feel that in some odd way he was still in communication with them through a channel I could not tap. I felt that he knew all about the dreams and the dreamers. I tried to make it forcefully clear that I was only curious about his world, that I intended no violence. I sat down again and he asked, again with that touch of humor, what I wanted to know.”

“It sounds so dull!” Leesa said.

“It did not seem so. We spent the entire dream in talking. They call the third world Ormazd. It seems to be named after some principle of goodness. They each live alone, quite simply, and at a considerable distance from one another. They give great care and attention to training and teaching their young. He seemed to ‘speak’ to me as if I were a child. They live for the development and progress of pure thought, thought independent of all emotion. They have been progressing in that pattern for twenty thousand years. The reading of minds is part of that progress, and he told me that when they had at last eliminated all language and all words, they had eliminated all possible misunderstanding between people. They have no crime, no violence, no war.”

“And you say it isn’t dull?” Leesa asked.

“Here is what puzzles me the most. I know he knows about us. He told me to dream about other worlds rather than about his. But the mental word he used was not exactly ‘dream.’ It was more like scan, or measure or survey. I tried to question him and got that grim mental laughter. He said we are powerless to disturb them. When I said I was seeking knowledge, he said that it could do no possible good to give it to me. He said it was too late. Too late for us. He said it would be easier for me to stay away from their world. And then in that odd laughter-of-the-mind, there was sadness for a moment. I had the feeling he had not meant to let me see the sadness. It was very quick, and all I got was something about a great plan having failed. I could feel his pity. I was very glad when I woke up at last.”

“The first two worlds sound much better,” she said.

“I can dream of any world I please now that my first three dreams are done,” he said. “I went to Jord Orlan and he told me the Law.”

“Can you tell me?”

“It is forbidden. But of course I will tell you. We both know too many forbidden things already, Leesa. This is the Law as he told it to me. If ever the dream creatures on any world make machines which will take any of them from their own world to some other world where they can live, then the dreams will end.”

“Why will they end?”

“I asked that. He said that it is the Law. He said that a long time ago the first world came dangerously close to building such machines, but the Watchers obeyed the Law and caused the people of the first world to destroy their own machines time and time again until there were great explosions and now the world is a long way from building such machines. The third world has no interest in building such machines. The danger is on the second world. He said that he is afraid that too many of us have forgotten the Law. In his lifetime he has destroyed, he said, three great ships on the second world. He said we should all be dreaming in the second world, but many will dream of nothing but the first world. Jord Orlan roams the second world in every dream, looking for the great machines that will end the dreaming.”

“If it is the Law,” Leesa said, “then it must be done.”

“Why? You and I have learned to read and to write. Only you and I can read the old records, fit the old spools to the viewing machines. Jord Orlan is firm and kind, but he no longer questions anything. He did when he was young. Now he accepts. He does not ask for reasons. That is blindness. I will know why, and if the reason is good, I will obey. What is the meaning of my life? Why am I here?”

“To dream?”

He could never forget the first three dreams, not even after eight years of dreams had been superimposed on those first ones.

While others dreamed their idle amusements and mischiefs and sensations, Raul had made the dreams and the waking times all a part of the same search. On the silent upper levels he spent eight years going through forgotten spools and records of all the eternity of the Watchers.

And for eight years he spent every dream in the second world, and the early dreams were always wasted when they began in some primitive place of jungle or desert, because usually then the dream would end before he could move from mind to mind a sufficient distance to reach some city where there would be libraries and laboratories. Many of the dreams were wasted in small villages until he learned the knack of thrusting upward as strongly as he could, floating in blackness, then thrusting downward and reaching out for the sense of other presences. Then as he learned the geography of the second world, he learned how to identify the area where the dream first took him, and thrust in a chosen direction for an estimated distance. Then only the first hour of ten might be wasted, but for the remainder he would be reading, through skilled and professional minds, the texts and papers on astronomy, physics, mathematics, electronics, history...

At last the answer came to him, shockingly, abruptly. He realized he had known it for some time but had not been able to accept it because it required such a total inversion, a turning inside out and outside in of all previous beliefs.

The answer was as blinding as a flash of intense light.

It was as unanswerable, as unarguable, as death itself.