Tom O'Bedlam Read online

  “Metempsychosis?” April said.

  “That’s it, yeah. People signed up in droves. I’m surprised you weren’t on our list. Christ, maybe you were. Everybody wanting to go, but of course it was just bullshit, we were going to have trouble with the process and refund all the deposits later on, but meanwhile we were making interest on the cash, you see? Plenty of it, millions. And then they got us. Me. I took the fall, some of the others got off. But what eats me, April, is now the scam is coming true, in reverse, goddamn Betelgeuse Five is metempsychosing to Earth. That’s what’s so unbelievable to me, that suddenly people’s minds are in tune with other stars, the very thing I was peddling. I knew I was phony. But this—”

  “No, it’s real, Ed.”

  “How do I know? How do I know? Sometimes I think the bastards are just fooling me. Making it all up just to mess up my head.” They were deep in the forest now. Just the two of them. Is that really what I believe, he asked himself? That it’s like a conspiracy? Even Lacy, back in San Francisco, seeing the big golden thing with horns: Alleluia had seen the same thing. Could Lacy possibly be in on the deal too? No, how could Lacy have managed to tell her dream to Alleluia? She didn’t even know that Alleluia existed. Even he had to admit that it was crazy to doubt the dreams. But all the same he did doubt. “Tell me about what you saw this morning,” he said. “The jellyfish people.”

  “I’m not supposed to discuss—”

  “Jesus,” he said. They were all alone, nobody around but the chipmunks. He smiled and came close to her. For an instant she gave him a worried, frightened look. “You could be very attractive, you know?” Ferguson told her, and drew her up against him. She was wearing a blue cashmere pullover, fuzzy, soft. He slipped his hand up under it and felt her breast, bare within, so big that he couldn’t cover the whole of it with his outspread fingers. She closed her eyes and began to sigh. He found her nipple and rubbed his thumb against it slowly, and in an instant it was hard as a pebble. She pushed the lower half of her body against him again and again and made little sighing sounds.

  Then he took his hand away.

  “Don’t stop,” she said.

  “I want to know. I need to know. Tell me what you saw.”

  “Ed—”

  He smiled. He put his mouth over hers and slid his tongue between her lips, and touched her breast again, outside the sweater. “Tell me.”

  With a sigh she said, “All right. Don’t stop and I’ll tell you. The sky on this world I dreamed is all lit up, it’s a million billion stars surrounding the planet, so there’s daytime all the time, brilliant daytime. And these beings float through the atmosphere. They’re gigantic, and they look something like enormous jellyfish, transparent, with dangling stuff, very intricate. Oh, Ed, I shouldn’t be telling you this!”

  He massaged her stiff nipple. “You’re doing terrific. Keep going.”

  “Each entity is a colony of beings, like. There’s the dark brain in the middle, and then there are the coiling dangling things that hunt for food, and the ones with little oar-legs that propel the colony, and the ones that—that do the reproductive things, and—and, oh, I don’t know, there must be fifty other kinds, all bound together, writhing clusters and tangles of them, each one with a sort of mind of its own, but all connected to the main mind. And on the outside of the whole thing are the perceptors that function in all this dazzling light like eyes, but they aren’t really eyes because they’re all over every bit of the outside—”

  He said, “Did it look the same the other time you saw it?”

  “I don’t know, Ed. They picked me, remember? I lost it then. But I think it must have been the same, because it’s a real projection of a real world, so how can it be different each time?”

  He didn’t know about real projection of a real world. But her description was the same, for sure. She was using some of the exact phrases she had the other day, two, three, four days ago, when she had first told him about the jellyfish people and the sky full of light. He couldn’t remember what she had said that day any more than she could, but he had it all down on his recorder. And that was what she had said and he had transcribed, writhing clusters and tangles and a dark brain inside the transparent body.

  “You mustn’t say I told you, Ed.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Hold me again, won’t you please?”

  He nodded. Her face came up toward his, eyes bright and misty, lips parted, tongue-tip visible. Poor fat broad. Probably wishes she could leave her body behind and jump to that other world tomorrow and live like a jellyfish-being with dangling clusters of stuff. Happily ever after.

  “Oh, Ed—Ed—”

  Goddamn, he thought. There’s no hiding from it: they all do have these dreams, everybody but me, sharing the same dreams, Christ only knows how. The bastards, the bastards. Everybody but me. He asked himself what use he could make out of all this. There had to be a use. All his life he had turned to his own use the fact that he missed out on a lot of things that other people experienced. All right, this too. Maybe they’ll have some special need for somebody who’s immune to the dreams and I can trade that for an end to the goddamn daily mindpicking, or something. Maybe.

  April pressed herself close, pistoning her hips against him.

  “Yeah,” he said softly. A deal was a deal. She had told him what he wanted to know; now he had to come through for her. He slipped his hand under her sweater again.

  5

  ELSZABET said, “Output Dreamlist,” and the data wall in her office lit up like a stock-exchange ticker display.

  1) Green World

  Six reports

  Single green sun, heavy green atmosphere, crystalline humanoid inhabitants.

  2) Nine Suns

  Three reports

  Nine suns, various colors, in sky simultaneously; large extraterrestrial figure frequently visible.

  3) Double Star One

  Seven reports

  Large red sun, variable blue one; extraterrestrial being, horned, associated with white stone slab.

  4) Double Star Two

  Two reports

  One yellow star, one white one, both much larger than our sun. Matter streaming from both stars forming veil around whole system emitting intense red aura in sky of planet.

  5) Sphere of Light

  Six reports

  Planet positioned within globular star cluster so populous that constant brilliant light encloses it on all sides. Inhabited by complex medusoid/colonial atmosphere-dwelling creatures.

  6) Blue Giant

  Two reports

  Enormous blue star giving off fierce output of energy. Planetary landscape molten, bubbling. Ethereal inhabitants not clearly visualized.

  “Data entry,” Elszabet said.

  She began to post the morning’s haul of dream reports.

  April Cranshaw, Blue Giant.

  Tomás Menendez, Green World.

  Father Christie, Double Star Two.

  Poor Father Christie. He took the dreams worse than any of the others, always interpreting each one as God’s personal message to him. He still hated to give them up. Every morning she had to go through the same struggle with him, usually needing to double-pick him to get him clean. Maybe if we weren’t picking him, she thought, the dreams would lose some of their transcendental power for him, and he’d be easier about the whole thing. On the other hand, if he weren’t getting picked he’d have to contend with the notion that God had come to him in half a dozen different bizarre alien guises over the past few weeks. And most likely he’d be in deep schiz by now, far beyond retrieval, if he had access to more than one dream at a time. Better that he should think each one was his first.

  Elszabet continued with the day’s entries.

  Philippa Bruce, Sphere of Light.

  Alleluia CX1133, Nine Suns.

  She felt something that seemed like a headache beginning to invade her, just the ghost of it, a tickling little throb around her temples. Strange. She ne
ver got headaches. Hardly ever. Time of the month, maybe? No, she thought. After-effects of getting punched by Nick Double Rainbow? But that was over a week ago. General tension and stress, then? All this puzzling over weird dreams? Whatever, the sensation was getting a little worse. Pressure behind her eyes, unfamiliar, nasty. She touched the neutralizer node on her watch and gave herself a buzz of alpha sound. First time she’d done that in ages. The pressure eased off a little.

  Going onward. Teddy Lansford, Nine Suns.

  A knock at the door. Elszabet frowned and glanced at the view-screen. She saw Dan Robinson outside, lounging amiably against the frame of the door.

  “You spare a minute?” he asked. “Got something new for you.”

  She let him in. He had to stoop crossing the threshold. Robinson was an elongated man, basketball-player physique, all arms and legs. He practically filled the little room. Elszabet’s office was nothing more than a small bare functional cubicle, floor of rough gray planks, tiny window, orange glow-light floating overhead. Not even a desk or a computer terminal, just a couple of chairs facing the floor-to-ceiling data wall. She liked it that way.

  Robinson peered at the data wall. The Teddy Lansford entry was still showing. He nodded toward it.

  “That’s his fourth one, isn’t it?”

  “Third,” Elszabet said.

  “Third. Even so, why does he get the dreams and not the rest of us? It doesn’t figure, that only one staff member should get the dreams.”

  “Teddy’s the only one willing to admit it, maybe,” she said. She didn’t amplify the statement. Naresh Patel’s lone Green World dream was still a confidential matter between him and Elszabet, and would stay that way as long as Patel wanted it that way.

  “You suspect that other staff people are hiding them?” Robinson asked. His eyes were suddenly very wide, very white in his chocolate toned face. “You think I am, maybe?”

  “Are you?”

  “You serious?”

  “Well, are you?” she asked, a little too sharply. She wondered why she was being so sharp with him. He was wondering too, obviously.

  “Hey. Come off it, Elszabet.”

  The headache was back. She felt the pressure again, stronger than before, a heavy throbbing at the temples. She shook her head, trying to clear it.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “You know I’m dying to experience one of those dreams. But so far it seems Lansford’s the only lucky one.”

  “So far, yes.”

  Except for Naresh Patel, she thought. And that had been just one time.

  “Why do you think that is?” Robinson asked.

  “Not a clue.” Elszabet hesitated and said—a stab in the dark—“Could it be that the dreaming or lack of it is a function of emotional resilience? The patients are extremely wobbly around the psyche, otherwise they wouldn’t be here, after all. That must lay them open to any manner of disturbances that staff people wouldn’t be vulnerable to. Such as these dreams.”

  “And is Teddy Lansford wobbly around the psyche?”

  “Well, he’s homosexual.”

  “So what?”

  She rubbed her forehead lightly. Something hammering away in there. It embarrassed her to press for an alpha buzz in front of Dan Robinson.

  “So nothing, I guess,” she said. “A silly hypothesis.” And Naresh Patel isn’t particularly wobbly around the psyche either, Elszabet told herself. Or gay, for that matter. “Lansford’s actually pretty sturdy emotionally, don’t you think?”

  “I’d say so.”

  She said, “I can’t tell you, then. Maybe when we have more data we’ll be able to figure it better. Right now I don’t know.” Brusquely she added, “You said there was something new you wanted to talk to me about?”

  He looked at her. “Are you okay, Elszabet?”

  “Sure. No, not really. Beginnings of a headache.” Something beyond just beginnings, now. It was really banging away. “Why, does it show that much?”

  “You seem a little touchy, is all. Impatient. Sharp. Short. Not much like your usual self.”

  Elszabet shrugged. “One of those days, I guess. One of those weeks. Look, I told you I was sorry for snapping at you like that before, didn’t I?” Then she said more softly, “Let’s start this all over, okay? You wanted to see me. What’s up, Dan?”

  “There’s a new dream. Number Seven. Double Star Three.”

  “How’s that? I thought we had all the reports for today.”

  “Well, now there’s one more. This one courtesy of April Cranshaw, half an hour ago.”

  With a shake of her head Elszabet said, “We’ve already got April’s entry. She reported the Blue Giant dream for last night.”

  “This isn’t last night,” Robinson said. “It’s this morning, after pick.”

  That was startling. “What? A daytime dream?”

  “So it seems. April was shy about admitting it. I think she was afraid we’d send her back for a second picking this morning. But it was on her conscience and she finally came in with it. This may not be the first daytime dream she’s had.”

  “She’s now had more dreams than anyone,” Elszabet said.

  “Right at the top of the sensitivity curve, yes. I think she knows that too. And is a little troubled about it.”

  “What kind of dream was this?”

  “This is what I jotted down,” Robinson said.

  He handed her a slip of paper. Elszabet looked it over and said to the data wall, “Input Dreamlist.” The screen gave her input format and she read the new dream in:

  7) Double Star Three

  One report

  One sun much like ours in size and color, but second sun emitting orange/red light also present, of larger size than yellow one but more faint. Intricate system of moons.

  No life-forms reported.

  “That’s handy, having that list,” Robinson said.

  “It is, yes,” Elszabet said. She said to the data wall, “Output Dreamlist, Distribution Route One.”

  “What are you doing, printing it out for general reference use at the Center?”

  “That’s a good idea. I’ll do that next.”

  “What’s Distribution Route One, then?”

  “I just sent it around to the other Northern California mindpick centers,” Elszabet said.

  Dan Robinson’s eyes went wide again. “You did?”

  “San Francisco, Monterey, Eureka. I called around this morning to tell them what’s going on here, and Paolucci in San Francisco said yes, they were having something along the same lines, and he had heard the same thing from Monterey. So we’re setting up a data link. Dream descriptions, tallies of incidence. We need to know what in God’s name is happening. An epidemic of identical dreams? That’s brand-new in the whole literature of mental disturbance. If mental disturbance is actually what we’re dealing with.”

  “I wonder,” Robinson said. “There’s going to be some bitching, you going out to the other centers with this before bringing it up at a staff meeting here.”

  “You think so?” The pounding in her skull was getting to the impossible level now. Something in there trying to get out? That was how it seemed. “Excuse me,” Elszabet said, and gave herself a buzz of alphas. She felt her cheeks reddening, doing that sort of modification in front of him. The pain eased just a little. Trying not to sound as irritated as she really was, she said to Robinson, “I didn’t think it was classified stuff. I simply wanted to know if the other centers were experiencing this phenomenon, so I started calling, and they said yes, we are, send us your data and we’ll send back ours, and—” Elszabet shut her eyes a moment and clenched her teeth hard and drew a deep breath. “Listen, can we talk about these things some other time? I need to get some fresh air. I’m going to run down to the beach, I think. This lousy headache.”

  “Good idea,” Robinson said gently. “I could use some exercise too. You mind if I run with you?”

  Yes, I do min
d, she thought. Very much. The beach was her special place, her second office, really. She tried to escape to it a couple of times a week, whenever she had some serious thinking to do or just wanted to get away from the pressures of being in charge of the Center. It astonished her that the usually sensitive Robinson couldn’t understand that she didn’t want company right now, not even his. But she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that. Such a sweet man, such a good man. Elszabet didn’t want to seem to be snippy with him again. This is dumb, she told herself. All you have to say is that you need to be alone: he won’t take offense. But she couldn’t do it. She managed a smile. “Sure, why not?” she said, hating herself for caving in like this. She motioned to him. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  The beach wasn’t much: a little rocky cove walled in by flat-topped cliffs covered with iceplant. It was just under four kilometers from the main part of the Center, a nice easy twenty-minute lope down a narrow unpaved road bordered on both sides by sprawling red-barked madrone trees and a low scrub of manzanita. They ran side by side, moving smoothly and well. The throbbing in her head began to diminish as the rhythm of the jog took over. She wasn’t having any trouble keeping up with him, though his legs were even longer than hers. She knew how to run. In college at Berkeley, she had been an athlete, a runner, track team, all-state champion in almost every medium-distance event, the 800 meters, 1500 meters, 1600-meter relay, and more. Those long legs, the endurance, the determination. “You ought to consider a career as a runner,” someone had told her. She had been nineteen, then. Fifteen years ago. But what did that mean, a career as a runner? It was a waste of a life, she thought, giving yourself up to something as hermetically sealed, as private, as being a runner. It was a little like saying, You ought to consider a career as a waterfall, You ought to consider a career as a fire hydrant. It was a useless thing to do with yourself, okay for a bit of private discipline or for a collegiate extracurric, but you didn’t make a career out of it. For a career, she thought, you had to make some real use of your life, which meant entering into the human race, not the 1500-meter one. You had to justify your presence on the planet by giving something to the others who were here in space and time sharing it with you, and being the fastest girl in the class wasn’t close to being enough. Working at a center for the repair of the poor bewildered burned-out Gelbard’s syndrome people, eventually coming to be in charge of it: that was more like it, Elszabet thought. She ran on and on, saying nothing, scarcely even aware of the silent, graceful, dark-skinned man running beside her.