Wine of the Dreamers

Seven

Raul Kinson knew that he had to share his new knowledge with Leesa. They had grown apart since she had been permitted to dream.

He found her with a group of the younger adults. He watched her from the doorway. She had achieved the popularity, the leadership, that had been denied him. Though all thought her ugly, she was a source of constant pleasure and amusement to them.

No one could match the diabolical cleverness and inventiveness of her mind once she had taken over the hapless body of some poor citizen of world one or two. And no one could tell the dream exploits more entertainingly.

Discontent, he knew, had driven her down the more obscure pathways of the dreams, had made her vie with the others in the excesses of the dreams. She had gathered around her a group that attempted to outdo her, and always failed.

Raul listened, feeling sick at heart. In their game, each member of the group gave a short summary of their latest dream. If the group shouted approval, they would tell it in detail.

A woman said, “On the second world I found a host body on a boat. A great brute of a man. It was a small boat. I threw everyone overboard and then jumped myself. The food was left on the table. The other dream creatures will be sadly confused.”

The woman pouted as no one showed disapproval. A man said, “I became the one who guides one of the big machines which go through the air. I left the controls and locked the door and stood with my back against it and watched the faces of the passengers as the machine fell strongly to the ground.”

They looked at Leesa for approval. Her smile was bitter and her laugh lifted harshly over the laughter of the others. She said, “Because in the last dream I caused a great accident, you all must try to do the same thing. This last dream of mine was a small thing, but it amused me greatly.”

“Tell us, Leesa. Tell us!”

“I slipped very gently into the mind of a great man of world two. A very powerful man, full of years and dignity. Over the entire ten hours of my dream, I made him count all objects aloud. The vehicles on the street, the cracks in the sidewalk, the windows in buildings. I made him count aloud and did not permit him to do anything except count aloud. His friends, his family, his co-workers, they were all horrified. The man of dignity counted until his voice was a hoarse whisper. He crawled around on his ancient knees and counted the tiles in the floor. Doctors drugged him and I kept control of the old man’s mind and kept him counting aloud. It was most amusing.”

They screamed with laughter. During the next dream period Raul knew that all of them would seek variations of Leesa’s latest game, but by the time they gathered to recount their dreams, Leesa would have gone on to something else.

Raul thought of the myriad lives she had broken in her attempts to prove to herself that the dreams were in no way real, but the twist of her mouth betrayed her. He knew that she still suspected that the dreams might be real, and each additional torment she inflicted on the dream creatures made more heavy the load of conscience.

In the life she led apart from the dreams and the telling of the dreams, she had nothing to do with the other adults. She was aided in this by her appearance which, though it matched standards of beauty in worlds one and two, appealed in the world of the Watchers only to those who thought to stimulate jaded tastes with the unusual.

She looked across the heads of the others and met his glance boldly. He beckoned to her and she walked slowly toward him. He went out into the corridor and she followed him. “I wish to talk to you, Leesa. It is something important.”

“The dreams are important.”

“We will go up to one of the rooms of learning.”

She stared at him coldly. “I have not been up there in over two years. I do not intend to go up there now. If you wish to talk to me, you can meet me on the second world. We talked there once before.”

He agreed reluctantly. He had a sour memory of the last time they had talked on the second world. He arranged the place and the time with her, and the recognition signal. They ate together and went up to the corridor of dreams, entered their respective cases.

He had grown almost accustomed to the clamor of the traffic, the pushing, hurrying throngs on the streets of this, the greatest city of the second world. He was late, he knew. This time it had taken almost an hour to cover half a continent. Possibly Leesa had wearied of waiting for him. She had little patience these days.

Once near the hotel he selected a lean young male body, took over the mind with a casual brusqueness that bordered on the careless. He marched the captive body into the hotel. He had thrust the host-mind far back into a corner of the captive brain. Even in panic, the struggles were weak and far away, a faint fluttering that did not interest him. There were several young women in the lobby, obviously waiting. Near the clock he took a handful of objects from the pocket of the captive body, dropped them clumsily on the floor. He bent and gathered them up — knife, change, lighter.

When he straightened up, a tall girl in gray stood before him. He looked deeply into her eyes and said, in his own tongue, “Hello, Leesa.”

“You’re late, Raul.”

“I’m glad you waited.”

They stood together and talked in low tones.

To the bystanders it appeared that a nervous young man had just arrived to meet his date. They walked out of the hotel together. She said something in the tongue of this city. Through use he had learned a great deal of it, but it was easier to relax the pressure on the host-brain, to allow it to flow up to a point where its language became his. She smiled and repeated, “Now where?”

He turned down a quieter street. He looked up across the street, saw a man and a woman standing together looking out the window of another hotel, looking down the street. “If they’re alone in that room,” he said, “it should be a good place.”

As the gray nothingness closed around him, he made the practiced movement, slanting upward, reaching out ahead. Tendril-tips of prescience brushed another mind, tasted the blade-quick reaction of woman-mind, veered, found the other resistance point, flowed softly in.

He was standing, looking down five stories at the street. A young couple stood on the opposite side, talking excitedly. Leesa stood beside him, and she laughed. “Let them try to explain that to each other,” she said.

He looked at the small room. He pushed the captive mind down to the very thin edge of the breaking point, holding it there by an effort of will that had become almost unconscious. The body was older than the previous one. And he sensed that it was not a healthy body. It carried too much soft white weight. The woman, however, inhabited by Leesa, was beautiful in a clear-lined way.

Leesa sat on the bed. “Now be interesting, Raul.”

“I intend to be. Listen closely. For six months I have had almost all the answers, almost all of our history. Now I have the last pieces. I have gotten some of it from the rooms of learning, some of it through constant questioning of the best minds of world three. And the remainder from the science of this world. A very long time ago, Leesa, a longer time than you can visualize, our world was much like this one.”

“Nonsense!”

“I can prove every part of this. Our race had vast numbers. We found the secrets of travel through space. Our home planet circles a dying red sun very near a star these people call Alpha Centaurai. Twelve thousand years ago the Leaders, realizing that life could only be sustained on our home planet through a constant adjustment to the dwindling moisture and sinking temperature, directed a search for younger planets, planets suitable for migration. Three were found. This planet, also planet one, circling what these people call Delta Canis Minoris near Procyron, ten and a half light-years from here, and planet three, in the system of Beta Aquilae near Altair, sixteen light-years from this place, were found to be suitable.”

“I hear the words you say, and I can find no meaning in them.”

“Leesa, please listen. Twelve thousand years ago, our world was dying. The Leaders found three planets to which our people could migrate. The first world of the dreams, called Marith. This second world, Earth. The third world, Ormazd. For two thousand years the Great Migrations were the task of all our race. Ships were built which could cover the vast distances in a remarkably short time. Our race was ferried across space to the three inhabitable planets.”

“But, Raul—”

“Be still until I finish. The Leaders were wise. They knew that there were three raw savage planets to be colonized, and in the colonization there would be a divergence of culture trends. They were afraid that our people, diverging in three separate directions, would become enemies. They had a choice. Either set up the colonization in such a way that there would be frequent contact between worlds, or else isolate the three colonies until such time as they had advanced to the point where contact could be reestablished without fear of conflict between them. This latter choice was selected because it was felt that by encouraging divergence, each planet would have something new to contribute to the race as a whole once contact was reestablished. In order to implement the second choice — in order to prevent premature contact between the colonial planets — the Watchers were established.

“We, Leesa, are remote descendants of the original Watchers. All the migration ships were destroyed except the six I showed you from the window. The place Jord Orlan calls our ‘world’ is merely a vast structure built over ten thousand years ago, when the Leaders used all the science at the disposal of our race to make it as completely automatic, as immune to time as possible. The original Watchers, five thousand in number, were selected from all the numbers of our race. They were the ones with the greatest emotional stability, the most freedom from hereditary disorders, the highest potentials of intelligence. Those original Watchers were indoctrinated with the importance of their duties, their debt to the future of the race. They were given the great building on a dying world, and six ships with which to make periodic patrols to the colonial worlds.”

“But the ships are not—”

“Listen carefully. It was planned that there would be no contact between colonial worlds for five thousand years. Yet ten thousand have passed, and still it is the Law that we must prevent those ‘dream’ worlds from creating devices to enable them to leave their planets. Here is what happened. The structure Orlan calls our ‘world’ was too comfortable. Patrols were made for almost three thousand years. But those who made the patrols detested being taken out of the warmth and leisure of the structure. It had been built too well. The Watchers had not yet lost the science of the race. It took a thousand years to find a way to eliminate the physical patrols and still discharge the responsibilities given them. At last the Watchers, experimenting with the phenomenon of hypnotic control, with thought transference, with the mystery of the communication of human minds on the level of pure thought — a thing regarded as a superstition on Earth, yet practiced to the extent of near-atrophy of speech on Ormazd — devised a method of mechanically amplifying this latent ability in the human mind. The things we call dream machines are nothing more than devices which hook the massive power sources of our contrived world to the projection of thought, with three control settings so that the narrow, instantaneous beam is directed at whichever colonial world is chosen by the ‘dreamer.’ When we ‘dream’ we are but conducting a mental patrol of the actual colonial planets.”

“That is absurd! You are mad!”

“For many, many years the dreams were sober, serious affairs, conducted as they were meant to be conducted. The ships sat idle. The outside world grew colder. No one left the building. The science was lost. The Watchers failed in their purpose. The genetic selection of the original Watchers was varied enough to prevent the inbreeding and resultant stagnation for five thousand years. But when the science behind the dream machines was lost, the machines themselves acquired a primitive religious significance. We have become a little colony, less than one fifth of the original number. We are blind to the true purpose of our existence. We have gone on for double the length of time originally intended. We are a curse and an affliction to the three colonial planets, merely because we believe that they do not exist, that they are something for our pleasure.”

“Raul, you know that I am not here. You know that I am in the dream case which is mine for all my life, my hand under my cheek, and—”

He went on inexorably. “We deal with three colonial planets. Marith, our favorite playground, has been turned into chronic primitive barbarism. Four thousand years ago Marith was close to space flight. We smashed them, through the dreams. There, when we possess a person, we are known as devils, as demons.

“And five thousand years ago Earth was ready for space flight. We smashed that culture, completely. When we were through, we left behind us the Aztecs, with only remnants of what had been an atomic culture. We left them with the rudiments of brain surgery, with stone pyramids shaped like the space ships they had tried to build, with sacrifices to the sun god on top of the pyramids — sacrifices actually to the hydrogen-helium reaction which they had conquered and which we had destroyed as they attempted to use it. Now Earth culture has returned to an atomic culture. We shall smash it again, drive them back into savagery. When we take over an Earth body, they have many names for us. Temporary insanity. Epilepsy. Frenzy. Trance. There are over seven hundred of us who are permitted to dream. Seven hundred feckless children who can commit acts without fear of consequence.

“On Ormazd they know who we are, and what we are. Twice we have destroyed their attempts to cross space. They no longer have the urge to leave their planet. They have found vaster galaxies within the human mind than any that can be conquered by machines. All three colonial planets would be better rid of us, Leesa.”

In a halting voice she said, “I have tried to believe you. But I cannot. Were I to believe you, it would mean that...”

“You might have to accept a moral responsibility for the acts you have committed, for death you have brought to people as real as you and I?”

“We are in the dream cases, Raul. The clever machines make this world for us.”

“Then break that mirror. Tomorrow you can return to find it broken. Or dive from that window. Tomorrow you can return to find the broken body of the girl you are inhabiting.”

“That is because of the cleverness of the machines.”

“There are other proofs, Leesa. On Ormazd you can find the records of the original Migrations. On Marith, you can read their mythologies, and find reference to the ships that landed, belching fire. They think they came from the sun. On Earth here, a race believes themselves descended from the sun. And there are traces, in Earth mythology, of giants that walked the earth, of great ships and chariots that crossed the sky. All three planets were populated by manlike creatures before our remote ancestors arrived. On Earth, after a time, the two races could interbreed. On Marith and Ormazd the original races died out. You see, Leesa, there is too much proof to be ignored.”

She was silent for a long time. “I cannot believe what you say. Tomorrow I shall enclose myself in the case. I shall become a naked savage girl in a jungle, or a woman leading a burro down a mountain path. Or I can meet with my friends on Marith and we can play the game of identification, or the game of killing, or the game of love, or the game of the chase. No, Raul. No. I cannot change what I believe.”

“Leesa,” he said softly, “you have always believed, in your heart, that these worlds are real. That is why you have been so wanton, so cruel, in your dreams, because you were trying to deny their existence. You and I are different. We are not like the others. We are stronger. You and I can change the—”

He stopped speaking as he saw the woman on the bed put her hand to her forehead and look at him oddly. She spoke so slowly that even without releasing the host, he understood her. “George, I feel so strange.”

Leesa had gone. He knew not in what direction. She had ended the talk in such a way that he could not find her. He let the host-mind take over the maximum amount of control, right on the edge of the fading of vision and hearing which would mean a full release of the host.

“Something wrong with those drinks, maybe. That bartender had a funny look. Maybe it was a mickey. I feel funny too.”

The woman lay back on the bed. Raul felt the slow beginning of desire in the host-body. The woman smiled up at him. As the man moved toward the bed Raul released the last of his control, faded off into the familiar area where there was no color, no light. Nothing but the strange consciousness of direction. He slanted downward with a gentle impulse, drifting until he felt the nearby entity, orienting himself to it, gathering it in slowly. Vision came. He was in a taxi. He was late. The host-mind was fogged with alcohol, but the emotions were particularly vivid. Raul read the mind as one might turn the pages of a book. Despair and torment and the desire for death. Hate, fear and envy. But most of all an enormous longing for a sleep that would be endless. The man paid the driver, walked slowly into a lobby, took the small self-service elevator up to the eighth floor. He unlocked the door and went in. The woman came out of the bedroom with the shining weapon in her hand. She pointed it and shut her eyes. The little hot bits of lead bit warm liquid channels into the host-body — not pain. Just shock and warmness and a sort of melting. The host-brain faded quickly, and as Raul slid away, he caught the last impulse of consciousness. Not satisfaction with the surprise gift of the death that had been desired — but panic and fear and longing for the things of life as yet untasted.

Raul did not find ease of spirit until at last he entered the mind of a man, an old man, who sat in the park, half dozing in the sun. In that mind he waited for the dream to end.